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B.C. restaurant to become Canada’s first tipless eatery

David Jones’s new restaurant, Smoke and Water, at the Pacific Shores Resort in Parksville, B.C. It will feature a 6,000-gallon fish tank — and a no-tipping policy.Photo: Brian Wilford, Oceanside Star, for Victoria Times Colonist

David Jones has a plan to revolutionize Canada’s hospitality industry.

This June, when he opens Smoke and Water at the Pacific Shores Resort in Parksville, British Columbia, Jones says customers will no longer have to awkwardly fuddle with their iPhone calculators. The tip will already be included in the price of your meal.

“Tipping is a broken business model,” he explains to the Vancouver Provence. “When you take away tipping, you find you get more seasoned servers and you’re able to increase the quality of personnel you get in the back of house,”

In lieu of gratuity, Jones has adopted a model already accepted in Japan, New Zealand, Australia and parts of Europe: increase the price of food in order to pay his staff a living wage.

By increasing menu prices by 18 per cent, the 155-seat restaurant will pay servers between $20 and $24 an hour and cooks $16 to $18 an hour.

Jones says he’ll also put aside a small percentage of gross receipts to pay for medical and dental coverage for his 48 staff.

And if a customer decides to leave a tip anyways? “We will not accept them, we will give them back,” Jones claims. “If a tip is left and we can’t get it back to (a customer), we will donate it to charity.”